Reports of the outage on DownDectector.com began just before 8 a.m., Eastern time, on Tuesday, and reports on the site continued steadily in the following hours before beginning to drop off in the early afternoon. Three quarters of users who reported issues on the site said they were experiencing either a total blackout or login problems.

In a post on its Facebook for Developers site, the company wrote on Tuesday morning that "we are currently experiencing issues that may cause some API requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly. We are investigating the issue and working on a resolution." As of this writing, the post had not been updated.

A Facebook spokesperson released a statement that echoed the company’s earlier Twitter post.

The incident followed similar outages for Facebook on Nov. 12 and Aug. 3.

Following the August outage, Bob Venero, CEO of Holbrook, N.Y.-based solution provider Future Tech, No.115 on the CRN Solution Provider 500, told CRN that outages of this type highlight "just how important the solution provider community is in properly architecting a solution from the ground up for our corporate and government customers."

Venero stressed that the key to any corporate solution is a strong business continuity plan if there is a website issue. "Outstanding service is how we separate ourselves from the rest of the pack," he said.